Bob Dylan at the London Palladium: the world's most inscrutable performer still does things on his own terms – review

The magnificent, mercurial, mysterious Bob Dylan brought his band to the London Palladium for another mesmerising performance. On the first of three nights in the venerable West End theatre, it was impossible to take your eyes off the old man in the white homburg, as he crooned and croaked, recited and gargled a wayward path through his extraordinary back catalogue, dashing off wonky piano solos and throwing poses in a manner that at times seemed almost as baffling to his band as to his audience.

Dylan really is the most inscrutable performer in the whole world of popular music. On one level, he just turns up and plays his songs, and that is what troubadours have been doing since time immemorial. His audience, though, attach such meaning to the songs, and to Dylan himself, that the whole experience becomes freighted with expectations and deeper resonances that the man at its centre either refuses to engage with or mischievously subverts.

The 75-year-old Nobel Prize winner crouched bent-kneed at the piano (an instrument he does not play particularly well) or rambled about the stage as if trying to find his way out. Whenever he was on his feet, he never stopped shuffling in almost comically fidgety fashion. He bobbed from one foot to the other, momentarily resting left hand on hip in a peculiarly regal pose or grabbing the microphone stand and tipping it with cavalier swagger. He never spoke or engaged eye contact.

Bob Dylan performing in 2011 Credit:
AFP

The Palladium is a venue well suited to the Swing era classics that Dylan has lately been focusing on (with five albums worth of cover versions). I imagine the audience half expected Dylan to turn in a set of crooning standards. In the event he performed a quixotic mix of his own classics, some particularly intense versions of blues burners from the last few decades of his career (Love Sick and Pay in Blood were fantastic) and just a smattering of tender, heartfelt interpretations of standards, culminating in a moody and moving rendition of Autumn Leaves.

His five piece band set up a liquid flow and tumble of notes and beats over which Dylan could shift in any direction he pleased. He is a very odd musician, playing and singing notes that bear little relation to what anyone else is hearing. He is impossible to sing along with. But he’s Bob Dylan, and so band and audience choose to go with it. Rock ’n’ Roll’s great bard still twists lyrics any which way he wants, sometimes barking them, sometimes reciting them, sometimes reaching deep into new melodies.

On a truncated Tangled Up in Blue, he playfully switched up classic lines. Reminiscing on “people that we used to know”, the ancient trooper changed the pay-off to “Some of them went down in the ground / Some of the names are written in flames / Some of ’em just skipped town”. It made his declamatory “but me, I’m still on the road” all the more potent. Many of the first great rock generation have left us. Dylan is still on the road. And his fans are just glad to still have him.